The Laura Dowling Experience
#170 Caroline Foran | The Nervous System, Anxiety & PDA Parenting
21 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What does a PDA profile mean for a child's nervous system?
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Chapter 3: Why can traditional parenting methods backfire with PDA children?
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Chapter 4: How does performative parenting affect relationships with children?
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Caroline face before her son's diagnosis?
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So is your son non-verbal then? No, he is verbal. Can't shut him up half the time. But there's so much about him that challenged what we thought we knew about autism, like in our very limited knowledge, I guess, how we have all absorbed messages and representations of autism. So for the longest time, we were told it's just anxiety. You were told about your son? Yeah.
Anxiety is such a huge part of neurodivergence as I'm learning. Like it's It can be the driver of people almost finding out and getting diagnosed sometimes, especially if they're like lower support needs and anxiety is very prominent. But for him, it was really severe separation anxiety and nothing I did seemed to move the needle.
And like, obviously, I'm very aware of anxiety and myself and like what helps and what doesn't help and the language to use. But we were banging our heads against the wall for the longest time and the anxiety wasn't improving. And eventually... through a lot of emotional ups and down, we discovered that he's autistic with a PDA profile.
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Chapter 6: How did Caroline's own anxiety history impact her parenting?
So what does PDA mean? PDA, I remember Googling it when people sort of said, have you come across this? And I was terrified. I was like, please, this is the worst thing you could tell me right now is if this is what my son is going to have to live with. But it stands for traditionally pathological demand avoidance, which sounds like a person will just never be able to respond to a demand.
And that's very hard to live in the world with. It's very hard to be a child with. It's very hard to parent someone with. But I think the more preferred term, and I'm just learning all of this now, is a pervasive drive for autonomy. Oh, that's so much nicer. Well, it's a lot nicer.
Isn't it?
Chapter 7: What role do medication and therapy play in managing anxiety?
Yeah. And actually, just to be really clear, because I know Caroline, you were a little bit worried about if we do happen to talk about autism in this podcast, that you are worried that you could maybe offend anyone in the autism community with the language that you use or the way you're expressing it. But it's really important that everyone knows that this is your lived experience.
experience, you're new to it all as well because your son has only recently had a diagnosis and we're absolutely not out to offend anyone or upset anyone. We're just talking about your story and maybe it'll help someone else.
Yeah, I mean, we're only a few months in, so I would like be so far from describing myself as like coming on radio and being an expert about autism. And the language is changing all the time and what we're learning about changes all the time. And even within autism, you know, they say you've met one autistic person, you've just met one autistic person. There's so much variation.
So I can only speak from the experience of my son and his particular needs and his personality and how it shows up for him. So pervasive?
Chapter 8: How can showing the body safety help manage anxiety?
Pervasive drive for autonomy. So basically what that means is His nervous system is set to a very high point as a rule almost all the time. Anything that his body or brain perceives as a demand, and it's a perception of a demand, it doesn't have to be an ostensibly like, I'm telling you to put your shoes on.
It can be very subtle, but that registers in his nervous system as a threat and that activates his fight or flight response. And it's that black and white and it's that immediate, but it's also... People who are experts in it describe it as a nervous system disability. It's a profile within autism, so it currently sits under the autistic umbrella as a neurotype.
I do think in time, I do think there's a lot of people from what I've read that would maybe be ADHD plus PDA and not necessarily autistic plus PDA. But right now, the diagnostic criteria means it lives under autism. Now, I'm pretty certain that my son is, even if you took away the PDA, he's autistic. But the PDA completely changes the nature of it.
It's kind of like walking on eggshells a lot of the time because you're either going to activate the nervous system and you're just trying to keep things calm. And it's all about safety and connection instead of... trying to hold a boundary for a boundary's sake, which is everything we've been taught and told about parenting.
Like, you know, how we define a good parent is how good you are at getting your child under control and how good a child is gets defined as how compliant they are, how obedient they are, how willing to do what you as the adult need them to do are. And anything that goes against that is totally less favourable in society.
So the PDA in and of itself is so challenging, but it's also culturally so challenging because it's so It's a relatively new term. It's a relatively new criteria. And a lot of time it can just look like a really bad behavior. And it looks like something that he could just choose not to do. But it's underneath that it's getting to the root of that, knowing that that is a nervous system response.
And it's often a can't, not a won't. But it looks like crappy parenting sometimes. It looks like you just... have no control. And I think, I mean, in my experience, parents arrive at PDA after a very long time of trying all the traditional parenting approaches and it not only not working, but making things so much worse for everyone in the family.
And we all have absorbed those messages of how kids need boundaries. They need them to feel safe. So I'm, I was pushing and pushing this whole time being like, I have to be the, I'm the one in charge. I'm the calm, confident leader. And
But for him, for a PDA child, that sort of being above him, having that hierarchy where I'm like, no, I'm going here because I'm the parent and I get to decide that and you're the child. It's a recipe for disaster, even for a five-year-old PDA kid.
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